Stormwater Retention Pond Blues

If you happen to live in an urban area, you probably walk, cycle or drive by a stormwater retention pond almost every day. If you are not sure, just look for a medium-sized, murky body of water surrounded by a few acres of grass and geese (and the requisite industrial arrangement of precast stone, shrubs and riverrock). That'd be the one. Your local retention pond may smell like something leaking from the bottom of a supermarket dumpster, but it plays an important role, catching run-off from roads, parking lots and over-fertilized lawns, and filtering it so that less bad stuff finds its way downstream into rivers and lakes. From the civil engineer's perspective, these ponds are utilitarian machines, but to the real estate developer they can be a powerful marketing device. "Live with Nature", the developers tell us, and "Ravine Lots Available". Where I live, such signs usually denote nothing more than the fact that a creek or drainage ditch will be allowed to flow behind a row of houses, connecting one storm retention pond to another.

It seems to me that this kind of "life with nature" contributes to an urban idea of the nature world that is simplified, artificially controlled and patently false. It is also sometimes dangerous. Last weekend, two young boys decided to walk across a stormwater retention pond that had partially iced over. After testing the thickness with small stones, they began to cross over. One fell in and the other drowned trying to save him. Was this tragedy caused by a mistaken faith in their own youthful immortality? Or, have we merely created an over-developed urban landscape that makes it impossible for people to viscerally experience the beauty -- and the danger -- of a truly natural world?

To further confuse the issue is the fact that stormwater retention ponds actually provide poor habitat for fish and birds. But beggars can't be be choosers, so some species try to make a go of it regardless of the water quality. According to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment's manual Stormwater Management Practices (OMOE, 1994), "stormwater ponds should be considered treatment facilities and not a replacement for natural wetlands", but this is exactly what they have become. Today we went out for the Audubon Christmas Bird Count and found northern and shrike great blue herons, along with the usual suspects, at local retention ponds. We are supposed to enjoy looking at these ponds, but god help you if you fish or swim or otherwise "use" one of them. After last week's drowning, the president of the development made this clear in an interview with the Toronto Star:

"This is a very vital pond," said Madden, president of Diral Development Corp. Unfortunately, the increasingly complex array of municipal, provincial and federal approvals required for stormwater retention ponds is forcing developers to landscape these areas to look like parks, he said. "It's not a lake. It's not for recreational use. So don't entice people to go there," he said in an interview today. "Don't put walkways around it. Don't landscape it like it's part of the parks system. Landscape them with tall grasses to keep people away."

In other words, buy into the "live with nature" marketing dream, but once you move in, just look at "nature" from a safe distance -- don't come near it. Am I mad to think that this way of living is madness? Am I crazy to question Ontario's "Places to Grow Plan", which anticipates the population of the GTA will double within 25 years? Am I wrong to think that we have essentially reached the carrying capacity of our own environment? We're full up folks, although there appears to be plenty of physical space in which to put people. This is all the more worrisome when you consider the millions of environmental refugees that are expected to flood into developed countries in the coming decades. By trying to become the lifeboat of the world, will we all drown?